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Estimating Support Scores of Autism Communities in Large-Scale Web Information Systems

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Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2017 (WISE 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10569))

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Abstract

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been shown to prefer communication at a socio-spatial distance. So while rarely found in the real world, autism communities are popular in Web-based forums, convenient for people with ASD to seek and share health related information. Reddit is one such avenue for people of common interest to connect, forming communities of specific interest, namely subreddits. This work aims to estimate support scores provided by a popular subreddit interested in ASD – www.reddit.com/r/aspergers. The scores were measured in both the quantities and qualities of the conversations in the forum, including conversational involvement, emotional, and informational support. The support scores of the subreddit Aspergers was compared with that of an average subreddit derived from entire Reddit, represented by two big corpora of approximately 200 million Reddit posts and 1.66 billion Reddit comments. The ASD subreddit was found to be a supportive community, having far higher support scores than did the average subreddit. Apache Spark, an advanced cluster computing framework, is employed to speed up processing of the large corpora. Scalable machine learning techniques implemented in Spark help discriminate the content made in Aspergers versus other subreddits and automatically discover linguistic predictors of ASD within minutes, providing timely reports.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/aspergers/.

  3. 3.

    https://praw.readthedocs.org/en/stable/, retrieved March 2017.

  4. 4.

    http://bit.ly/1MvQobz, downloaded 1 October 2015.

  5. 5.

    http://bit.ly/1RmhQdJ, downloaded 1 October 2015.

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Acknowledgment

This work is partially supported by the Telstra-Deakin Centre of Excellence in Big Data and Machine Learning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia

    Nguyen Thin, Nguyen Hung, Svetha Venkatesh & Dinh Phung

Authors
  1. Nguyen Thin
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  2. Nguyen Hung
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  3. Svetha Venkatesh
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  4. Dinh Phung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nguyen Thin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, Australia

    Athman Bouguettaya

  2. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yunjun Gao

  3. Institute of Computing for Physics and Technology, Protvino, Russia

    Andrey Klimenko

  4. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Lu Chen

  5. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

    Xiangliang Zhang

  6. Institute of Computing for Physics and Technology, Protvino, Russia

    Fedor Dzerzhinskiy

  7. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Minhang Qu, China

    Weijia Jia

  8. Institute of Computing for Physics and Technology, Protvino, Russia

    Stanislav V. Klimenko

  9. City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Qing Li

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Thin, N., Hung, N., Venkatesh, S., Phung, D. (2017). Estimating Support Scores of Autism Communities in Large-Scale Web Information Systems. In: Bouguettaya, A., et al. Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2017. WISE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10569. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68783-4_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68783-4_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68782-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68783-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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